Increase Your First Draft Speed

Hey y’all — here’s today at a glance:

🔗 Houck’s Picks

My favorite finds of the week.

Fundraising

• Raising a seed round 101 (Link)

• How to raise a strong Series A (Link)

Growth

• The anatomy of high-converting homepages (Link)

• How this app studio scaled to 7 figures with paid ads (Link)

ICYMI

• Brian Chesky on how to design a product for a million people (Link)

• An important metric you may not be considering (Link)

• Everything you need to know about enterprise pricing (Link)

• Advice before starting a 90-day sprint to start your business (Link)

• Definitive list of everything startups did that didn’t scale (Link)

💡 Opportunity: Database Schema

This week’s opportunity is that you should just fork VSCode.

But if you’re compelled to work on something more original than that, here’s one for you:

I’ve been talking for a while now about how we’re going to see dynamically-created personalized software in the near future, where you can ask your hardware devices to build new software for you on-demand, just when you need it.

A fun step in that direction, that’s extremely generalizable and potentially a venture-scale opportunity is a platform that allows users to create a UI simply by providing:

1. A dataset (or even just a schema — the platform could pull in data from the internet in some cases)

2. A prompt giving it some level of direction on the UI and UX

Imagine the ability of turning any and every Google Sheet you use into a customizable UI in seconds.

I actually love this idea. If you’re technical and thinking about exploring it, let me know — we should chat.

🧠 Framework: Marc Andreessen’s Hiring Advice

Once you’ve hired a lot of people you probably have developed your own style to find the things you value.

But many founders don’t really know what they’re doing when they hire for the first time, across various types of rolls.

Here’s a TLDR from Marc Andreessen:

📈 Trend: Taste

The opportunity of the week, from above, is in line with the broader trend of software not being a differentiator any more.

You may have read this excellent essay on why taste, and opinionated software, is now a bigger differentiator than the software itself… or, at least, that’s where we’re heading.

If you’re looking to start new, venture-scale ideas I’d look for things outside of traditional SaaS:

💬 Quote: First Draft Speed

You don’t need to get it right.

You really don’t.

But you do set the pace of the company as the founder.

If you take a day to respond to your team’s messages, or put together a draft of something, they certainly won’t put in the extra effort to be fast either.

The best founders I know get things down on paper and start moving as fast as possible. They ship quickly and get in front of customers quickly.

That’s why I like this idea of “first draft speed” from Shaan Puri.

If VCs were easily able to measure this when considering making an investment, I believe we’d have a much higher hit rate in the industry.

💡 How I Can Help

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